Twisting LAPD Impound Policy to Favor Illegals

This, too, claimed a succession of speakers at a recent meeting of the L.A. police commission, places an unfair burden on illegal immigrants, who cannot legally obtain driver’s licenses in California but rely on cars to get to and from work. Several of these speakers were attorneys for such groups as the National Lawyers Guild, one of whom had the crust to claim that the California statute that authorizes officers to impound cars driven by unlicensed drivers was actually aimed at drunk drivers, not those who are merely unlicensed. You have to be a lawyer, and a very liberal one, to look past the plain language of the law and find that it means what it doesn’t say and says what it doesn’t mean.

But again, all this debate is merely an exercise, one small bump on the road to erasing whatever distinctions that might remain between a U.S. citizen and anyone from anywhere who manages to evade detection while slipping into the country. And now, Chief Beck has endorsed granting driver’s licenses to illegal aliens in California, advocating what would be yet another in a long series of state or local accommodations to the failure of federal immigration enforcement.

When all is said and done Chief Beck and his allies in this effort will to some degree or another be satisfied with the outcome, and whatever burdens that remain on illegal immigrants in Los Angeles will be incrementally eased as time goes on and those who oppose the trend grow weary and give up the struggle or abandon the city altogether.

We are witnessing the gradual enactment of a separate foreign policy for the city of Los Angeles, albeit one that the current administration in Washington surely would find untroubling. In this policy we are asked to hold it “fair” that people who should not be here be allowed to keep the cars they should not drive so they can get to the jobs they should not have. Why would anyone argue with that?